Claroty researchers in 2020 conducted an extensive analysis of the OPC network protocol prevalent in OT networks worldwide. During that research, Claroty found and privately disclosed critical vulnerabilities in OPC implementations from a number of leading vendors that have built their respective products on top of the protocol stack. The affected vendors sell these products to companies operating in many industries within the ICS domain.
The vulnerabilities discovered by Claroty could be exploited to cause a denial-of-service condition on devices operating on industrial networks, as well as information leaks, and remote code execution. Our research identified weak spots in different OPC specification implementations within different components of the OPC architecture. These components include the OPC server, OPC gateway, and a third-party library implementation of the OPC protocol stack
In this report, we will explain the OPC protocol in depth, its architecture, and common usage in order to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of these vulnerabilities. We will also describe the vulnerabilities we uncovered, and explain the potential threat posed by attackers who exploit these vulnerabilities to take over OPC servers and gateways, and potentially harm manufacturing facilities and production lines.
CWE-749 Exposed Dangerous Method or Function
When user authentication is not enabled the shell can execute commands with the highest privileges. Red Lion SixTRAK and VersaTRAK Series RTUs with authenticated users enabled (UDR-A) any Sixnet UDR message will meet an authentication challenge over UDP/IP. When the same message comes over TCP/IP the RTU will simply accept the message with no authentication challenge.
CVSS V3: 10
CWE-288: Authentication Bypass Using an Alternative Path or Channel
Red Lion SixTRAK and VersaTRAK Series RTUs with authenticated users enabled (UDR-A) any Sixnet UDR message will meet an authentication challenge over UDP/IP. When the same message is received over TCP/IP the RTU will simply accept the message with no authentication challenge.
CVSS V3: 10
The vulnerability is caused by the using deprecated deserialization functions and/or classes such as BinaryFormatter in the zenon internal graphic utility DLLs.
CVSS V3: 6.3
The vulnerability is caused by the default directory permissions for the Zenon Projects directory in the engineering studio default workspace. By allowing access to all the users on the system, the attacker may alter the zenon project itself to load arbitrary zenon projects in the zenon runtime.
CVSS V3: 5.9
Code Execution through overwriting service executable in utilities directory. The vulnerability is caused by the weakly configured default directory permission for the ABB Utilities directory.
CVSS V3: 7.0